How TikTok lifted off our small businesses

Contributor

Nation Media Group

When TikTok was launched in Kenya, not many knew that it would one day be a gold mine for entrepreneurs. For many business owners now, TikTok is where their clients are.
Meet Mwangi Muthoni, the proprietor of Dreadlocks Nairobi Kenya.

With over 50,000 followers, Mwangi posts all about dreadlocks: different hairstyles and how to care for them.
He started his TikTok page in 2021, but the focus was not much on the number of likes.
“We just created videos, and people commented. People asked questions, and we always answered. That’s how we started getting clients from TikTok as they began to have confidence in our work,” the 31-year-old hairstylist tells Lifestyle.
Mwangi studied information technology in college but says he failed to secure employment, partly because his dreadlocks affected his job opportunities.
“One employer said he wouldn’t hire an employee with dreadlocks and suggested I look for a job as a DJ. I decided to open the dreadlocks salon in 2013 because I love dreadlocks,” says Mwangi, who now has a salon at Kenya Cinema in Nairobi’s Central Business District.

One of the challenges of courting customers on TikTok is that you have to post your work, which means he has to ask clients whether they can take videos of their done hair.
“Most of our posts will not show the faces of our clients unless the client permits it. In any case, we are mainly interested in showing our followers our services,” says Mwangi.
As a man in a female-dominated hair industry, does he face sexism?
“It is actually the female salonists who face discrimination. When I started the salon, I hired mainly female hairdressers, but many clients believed that men are better qualified when it comes to making dreadlocks. So, it took a lot of training and convincing that women too are just as competent,” he says, adding “but the challenge in this industry is that you take time to train a hairdresser, and they get poached by other stylists, and they go with my clients.”

“After leaving a job as a group financial manager in 2017, I became an entrepreneur. I started with a small boda boda delivery service and then a butchery business. When I started my TikTok channel at the end of 2022, I had just experienced employee theft and lost Sh300,000 from my butchery. I was frustrated and wondered whether every businessperson goes through the same thing. I thought maybe I was the problem. I wanted to share my entrepreneurship journey. I thought things would be easier since I had been an accountant for a long time and had never stolen, so I thought that was how it was supposed to be everywhere. Now I found myself going back to the drawing board, having to learn and unlearn. Hence my username, ‘Unprepared Entrepreneur,’” the 36-year-old accountant says of her TikTok journey.